


There Is No Death

by blithers



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M, Force Ghost Ben Solo, Force Ghost(s), Post-Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Talking To Dead People
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-02
Updated: 2019-10-02
Packaged: 2020-10-19 07:56:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20653808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blithers/pseuds/blithers
Summary: Rey kills Ben Solo.  She kills him because he tells her to do it, and the last thing Ben Solo thinks is that he has never seen anything as sublime as Rey in that moment, limned with majesty and mercy, taking a burden on herself that means she will carry his death with her for the rest of her life.(Or, Ben haunts Rey as a Force ghost, as one does.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ghostcat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ghostcat/gifts).

> Happy birthday, Ghostcat! I hope you have the happiest and loveliest of days.
> 
> All my thanks to my beta reader, analise010. <3

Rey kills Ben Solo.

She strikes him down righteously, radiant, the balance of the Force within her. She is the will of the universe made manifest, fury and anger and compassion and mercy and the give and take between all living things, iridescence clinging to her form and her lightsaber gone white with power. There’s a universe between the two of them, an entire galaxy pivoting around the stable orbit of their Force bond, and she feels that immense gravity, pulling her forward, as she raises her lightsaber.

She kills him because he tells her to do it, and the last thing Ben Solo thinks is that he has never seen anything as sublime as Rey in that moment, limned with majesty and mercy, taking a burden on herself that means she will carry his death with her for the rest of her life.

He closes his eyes, and the First Order dies with him.

-

Rey wakes up eight days later, floating in darkness inside a bacta tank.

“Help! Help me!” she screams into the mask strapped to her face, and flails in the heavy gel, pressing in on her from all sides, rendering her weightless and helpless.

“I wouldn’t do that,” she hears Kylo Ren murmur, somewhere near her left ear.

She ignores the voice and continues to scream, eventually shifting enough in the warm gel to find a curved glass wall in front of her, a fixed point of reference, and pounds on the glass until a light switches on in the room.

They pull her out of the tank and onto the floor, gasping, blue-tinged bacta dripping off her like slime. Somebody - one of the medics - drapes a towel around her middle and another over her shoulders, where strands of her hair cling like dark seaweed. Rey thinks, dazed, that her hair is quite a bit longer than she remembers it.

“It’s the bacta,” the medic says. “It makes your hair grow as well, when you’re submerged for so long.”

“How long?” she gasps. “How long have I...?”

“A little over a week.” The woman helps Rey wobble, on unsteady legs, to a reclined bed nearby. “Your friend Finn is on his way. He wanted to be notified as soon as you woke up.”

Rey closes her eyes and Finn is there when she opens them again, holding her hand. His face is so open and concerned, so wonderful, so _dear_ that Rey bursts into tears, and Finn wraps her in his arms.

-

Finn tells her what’s happened since the night she’d left nearly three weeks ago, stealing a shuttle under the cover of darkness, consumed by the desperate need to find the man she shared a bond with that nobody else knew of, at the center of a vast maelstrom of evil known as the First Order.

Finn tells her that they’d found her floating in space, alone, the remnants of a Star Destroyer scattered around her in a vast field of debris, twisted metal orbiting her prone figure like small satellites. He says that, as near as they could tell, she had pulled all the nearby oxygen molecules from the destruction of the starship to herself, surrounding her in a shield of air that had been enough to keep her alive but unconscious until rescue arrived.

He says that Leia had been the one to find her.

“Leia!” Rey sits straight up in the hospital bed. “I have to tell her -”

Finn soothes her into lying back down, his hands gentle.

“Leia knows.”

“She…”

“The General was the person who knew where to look for you in the first place.”

“I killed her son,” Rey whispers.

“She _knows_,” he repeats, and resettles a lock of hair behind her ear.

“I killed Ben, Finn. I… I couldn’t…”

“Shh. She knows.”

-

Times passes, and the hurt doesn’t go away.

Silver lines score the skin that had been exposed to the vacuum of space in curved patterns, like the sand at the bottom of a river. She touches her cheeks as she looks in a mirror, and scarcely recognizes herself. The medics tell her that the scars will fade eventually, with application of bacta and time. Rey doesn’t think anybody understands what she sees in her own reflection.

The place where her connection with Ben had once lived feels hollowed out and empty inside of her. She can still sense - _something_ \- in that place, but what is left there is dim and small compared to the massive pull it had once been. She begins to realize, with a dawning sense of inevitability, that she will carry this aching place that was one Ben Solo inside her now for the rest of her life, along with the scars on her face.

She floats, untethered by purpose, and around her the world celebrates. The death of the First Order brings about massive social change, and the work of the Resistance transitions, throwing itself into arranging open elections and bringing democracy to a universe unused to such freedoms.

Rey allows the tidal wave of events to pull her under and drag her along, putting up no fight, and the ocean of the living world takes her where it will.

-

“Are you okay?” Rose asks her.

Rey is the prepping the Falcon for launch. She is flying the ship out alone, as she does more and more these days, as everybody’s workload shifts to ambassadorial missions and the millions of separate pieces of work to be done when spinning up the vast machinery of a better future.

Rey swallows down her instinctive response - _yes, I’m fine, it’s all fine, we won, we are on the right side of history_ \- and says, instead: “I don’t know.”

Rose reaches out and touches the side of Rey’s face.

“We’re all here for you, you know that, right? I miss you. We all miss you.”

“I know,” Rey says. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Rose says. “Just… take care of yourself, okay?”

Something hot and heavy lodges inside of Rey, sitting in her stomach like lead. “I’ll try,” she says.

“You do that. I’ll see you when you get back in a couple days, okay?” Rose smiles. “We’ll all go out, get some drinks. It’ll be fun.”

“Right.” Rey takes a deep breath in. “Right.”

-

Rey has just finished pulling on sleeping clothing before bed, the Falcon nestled in quiet on its hyperspace run. When she straightens up, Ben Solo, the last Prince of Alderaan, the heir apparent to Darth Vader, the downfall of the First Order, and the only man she’s ever killed, is standing at the other end of the room, a blue-ish sort of glow around him.

She’s used to him blinking into existence unexpectedly from before, the bond thrusting them into each other’s worlds and binding them together, but she certainly never expected it to continue happening after he _died_.

She panics, screams, and Force-throws a wrench set through the middle of his torso.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You do realize you’re dead, right?” she says, finally. “You died, Ben.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to my beta readers for this chapter, Ghostcat and analise.

The tool box flies through the middle of Ben’s body like a hologram, hitting the opposite wall with a thunderous clatter.

“Are you - “ She whirls around. “Who - “

“You’re not dreaming,” the Ben-figure says.

“I know I’m not dreaming.” She circles more slowly this time, examining the empty room for threats. “But you’re also not real, so something is clearly wrong.”

“I’m real,” he says.

Rey marches up to the figure, sticks a hand through his chest, and wiggles her fingers on the other side. She raises an eyebrow.

He steps back away from her, glowering, resuming the impression of glowing solidity. “I’m me. I’m a manifestation of the Force.”

“You’re... a what?”

“A manifestation of the Force.”

“You -” She has far too many questions; she settles for the easiest one first. “What are you _wearing_?”

He’s dressed in a soft grey tunic, the color pearled with the funny blue glow that surrounds him, his hands bare. The cut of the clothing is reminiscent of his uniform for the First Order, with a belt of fabric wrapped tight around his waist, but it’s mostly like nothing she’s ever seen him wearing before. She’s only ever seen Kylo Ren - _Ben_ \- clothed head to toe in ominous, unflinching black.

Ben looks down at himself.

“You look like a little bit like a Jedi.”

“I know.” He seems deeply uncomfortable with this fact.

“But you’re not a Jedi!”

His mouth twists unattractively. “I am also aware. It seems the Force has opinions of its own on the matter.”

Rey sits on her bed and wraps her arms around her shins, pressing her forehead against her knees, trying to think.

“You do realize you’re dead, right?” she says, finally. “You died, Ben.”

He looks down at her, ghost-light surrounding him like a child’s trick with mirrors.

“I know I died. I was there.”

“So you’re… a ghost?”

“Something like that.” He sounds amused now, like he knows something that she does not, and his tone of lazy superiority sharpens a small place of anger within Rey.

Their bond had grown rich and powerful in the time before Ben’s death. It had _sung_, redolent with triumph, at the killing of Snoke, and that surge of intensity had carved the channels and cuts between them deeper as it pulled them together for their final confrontation. Rey is not sure if Snoke had initially created the connection between them or merely thrown tinder on a glowing ember, but his death had seared the bond wide open, had burned it into both of their souls. She prods, carefully, at the hollow place within her where her bond with Ben had once lived, and finds it a little better at having this specter of a man here with her now, in whatever form he seems to be visiting her.

Even the anger she feels at him is familiar; it’s soothing, in a way. She understands that anger, in the context of him.

She crosses her arms over her chest. “Prove you’re really him.”

“How?”

“Tell me something only Ben Solo would know.”

He tilts his head and considers her. “When I first told you to kill me, you said that you would not.”

She remembers the metallic walls, lines of black and dark grey criss-crossing moodily around his silhouette, and the glow of crimson light. She remembers realizing that she was standing again in one Snoke’s antechambers, in one of the blood red hearts embedded in the center of each First Order Star Destroyer. The sudden understanding that Kylo Ren, the man in front of her, had recovered the throne room, for his own use.

“I called you a coward for it,” he says.

“It is not cowardly to refuse to kill somebody!”

“So you said at the time.”

“It’s still true.”

“And yet here I am, very much dead.”

“Not if I’m talking to you.” Rey looks around suspiciously again. “Maybe this is a hallucination.”

“This is not a hallucination. The Force is within us, the Force surrounds us. With everything you’ve experienced, this is what you can not accept?”

It _is_ hard to believe. Death has always seemed horrifically final to Rey; awful and irreversible, the end of an individual human soul as it rejoined the unfeeling ebb and flow of the universe. In killing Kylo Ren she had ended Ben Solo as well, doling out death in the same way she had seen many times on Jakku: the nasty, short end of a life struggling for meaning.

“Do you remember it?” she asks instead.

“Do I remember what?” He must see something in her expression, because he continues: “Ah. You want to know if I remember dying.”

She nods.

“Yes. I remember it. You killed me.” He says it plainly, as fact, but his tone grows rougher: slower, and more exposed. “I remember every second of it.”

A chill unfurls down Rey’s spine, and something something thick and awful lodges itself in her throat.

“I told you to do it. I wanted to die. I wanted it to be at your hand.” He’s staring at her now in the way he has always looked at her: his expression too intense, too naked. “I begged for death, and it was everything I wanted it to be.”

She digs the palms of her hands into her eyes, breathing in and breathing out, slowly and deeply, until she’s able to see clearly again, to face the ghost of the man she’s killed.

But when she looks up, he’s vanished.

-

She’s prepared when he comes back the next time: she feels the loneliness ease inside of her, and doesn’t turn around before speaking.

“There is no death,” she recites, and cranks the spanner around another one hundred eighty degrees. “Only the Force.”

Ben takes a step into Rey’s view. He passes a semi-translucent hand through the engine of the Millennium Falcon. His feet don’t touch the deck of the Falcon; he’s suspended in his glowing field a small distance up from the floor, like a holo projection with the calibration just off. What he is wearing is a little different: the band around his waist is black again, cutting through the soft grey of his uniform like a chasm of night sky.

“So is this because of the bond between us? Is this the same Force bond as before, but… you’re dead?”

“Maybe.”

She looks up at his tone. “But maybe not?”

“Didn’t Skywalker ever drop by and talk to you after he died?” He asks the question nonchalantly, as though this is something everybody does, talk to their estranged dead relatives after battling them on vast fields of salt and blood red.

Rey’s eyes almost bug out of her head.

“You mean Master Luke used to talk to you after he died?”

There’s a flash in Ben’s eyes of anger at that, of the vast emptiness of Kylo Ren’s indiscriminate, flat hatred. “The man wouldn’t shut up.”

“He never came back to talk to me.” It shouldn’t hurt as much as it does; she’s never been the person somebody comes back for. 

“Consider yourself fortunate. He was a font of useless advice that nobody wanted.”

She sits up straighter. “Wait. So - is this because you killed Master Luke? And I’m the person who killed you? Is that what this - bond or... whatever - is that what this is?”

“I didn’t kill Skywalker, as you well know.” He spits the name. “I should have been the one to kill him, though.” There’s a sneer on his lips, and she feels frustrated that even in death she has to deal with the man harping on about killing his old Jedi mentor and ruling the galaxy with a cruel and glove-clad fist.

“Don’t say that,” she snaps.

“Why shouldn’t I? It’s true.”

She doesn't want to argue with a dead man. “Just stop.”

Ben falls silent.

“Why did you come back from the dead to argue with me?”

“I didn’t come back to argue with you.”

“You could have fooled me.”

He pauses. “Maybe I do want to argue with you.”

“Great.” She bites the word off, and throws the spanner at her feet, the sound echoing.

“You’re mad at me,” he says.

“Can’t get anything past you.” Rey lifts herself up out of the engine room into the main cabin, and Ben is there beside her again, floating eerily, looking over the half-finished dejarik game that she plays remotely with Finn when the Millenium Falcon drops out of hyperspace.

“There is no love between Skywalker and myself. Death does not change that.”

“Maybe it should.”

“Why?”

“To start with, because you’re both dead.”

“And yet, I am still me and he is still wrong.”

They’d alternated between distance and argument and a strange, achingly resonant kinship after the killing of Snoke, as the bond wove itself closer around them, leaving them isolated, lonely beyond each other’s company. It feels _good_ to argue with Ben again, condescension mixed with respect, channeled into the strange, intense energy he has when he focuses on her. She feels the most alive she has in months.

“Have you spoken to Master Luke since…” Rey gestures.

“Since I died? No.”

“Could you?”

His eyes become unfocused, gazing at something she can’t see, some aspect of the universe she can’t reach and doesn’t understand. “Perhaps,” he says. He refocus on Rey then and, purposefully, takes a step closer to her. “However. I choose, instead, to speak to you.”

She debates the sentiment, and decides to speak the truth. “I am glad to speak to you as well.”

Ben takes another step closer to her.

“It has been difficult for me, these last few months. It has been - “ Rey struggles for breath, something like panic starting to build in her chest. “It has been _hard_,” she says finally, feeling the word woefully inadequate. “The bond we once had, it ripped apart when you died. It rebounded onto me. I have had to live with the repercussions of what I did to you every day since.”

“You were the only person worthy of killing me,” he states, matter of factly and pompously, as though such a messy, final, massive thing as death gave actual consideration to such lofty concepts as _worth_.

“That’s ridiculous.”

“We are bound together. It was always going to end like this for the two of us.”

“If the situation was reversed, could you have killed me?”

“At one point, gladly.”

Rey does not miss the qualification. “At one point I would have gladly killed you as well,” she murmurs, and thinks of the falling snow of Starkiller Base, of the stark, terrified white of Kylo Ren’s upturned face.

“At another point...” He shrugs. “You were always stronger than me.”

She hates him again, a little bit, for the admission that he could not have killed her, toward that end. That he had let that burden fall to her instead.

He takes a final step toward her, so close she could easily touch him, a glowing, blue-tinged figure. She had almost forgotten how large he was in the time since his death, the physical space he sucked up in a room.

“I have to go.” His voice is quiet; his eyes track her own, his head ducks down slightly to look at her.

“Will you come back?”

“Yes,” he says.

And by the time she draws her next breath, he is gone.


End file.
